


Triangles

by Glinda



Category: Leverage
Genre: Aromantic, Asexual Character, Assumptions, Bisexual Character, Emotional Baggage, Friends With Benefits, Getting Together, Multi, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Non-Sexual Kink, Polyamory, normal is subjective
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-15
Updated: 2018-04-15
Packaged: 2019-04-23 08:39:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14328708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Glinda/pseuds/Glinda
Summary: Parker loves both her boys, there’s not much she won’t do to keep them safe and happy, but sex isn’t one of those things. Alec is bisexual, and accidentally polyamorous, having somehow ended up with an asexual girlfriend and an aromantic boyfriend. Eliot is tired of pretending, but he’s got a Dom and a lover and neither of them asks him for anything he can’t give.





	Triangles

Parker is asexual. This causes lots of people to make assumptions about her. People presume, perhaps understandably given the stabbing, that her asexuality is a product of childhood trauma. Parker’s childhood left her with a considerable number of scars both physical and mental, but the vast majority of abuse she suffered was emotional. Puberty arrived later for her – malnutrition will do that to you – by which point she had already started her apprenticeship with Archie, who entirely approved of her stabbing people who tried to touch her without her permission. They once dropped a persistent offender off a building – just a small one, they wanted him to live to tell the tale – together and that kind of reputation turns out to be its own kind of armour. 

(The version of the birds and the bees talk that Parker got as a kid was not like other people’s but it was infinitely more useful to her day to day life. It boils down to, sex is for adults and any adult who tries to involve you in that is dangerous. So stab first and ask questions afterwards; you can always apologise later. It’s a theory that serves her well, even into adulthood. Over the years Parker has stabbed a lot of creeps – mostly minor injuries only – and very rarely needed to apologise.)

As an adult she makes some experimental explorations, both by herself and with carefully vetted others. She concludes that kissing is great, as are hugs and generally making out. Anything beyond that leaves her cold. 

Parker doesn’t like other people touching Alec. It’s a problem. Not for the reasons that Sophie thinks, but because Parker knows that Alec wants to touch her in ways that she doesn’t want to be touched. He’s always been utterly respectful about it, but the knowledge hangs there between them, that he’d like to touch her anyway that she’d let him. Given that, it seems unfair to ask him not to touch other people, but what she feels is what she feels, and it feels equally unfair to not clue him in on that. He’s been a good friend to her, whatever else happens, she wants to keep that. 

It turns out though, that negotiating the physical stuff is actually the easy bit. There are lots of ways to be physically intimate without bringing sex into the equation. Alec disappears one evening a week for a couple of months, and comes back with a certificate in massage therapy that both Parker and Eliot – and their spines in particular - come to really appreciate. If for Parker and Alec massage sessions devolve into snuggly make-out sessions, while for Eliot and Alec they end in really sensual sex, then that’s just something that the three of them have to negotiate. Or in reality, that Eliot and Parker negotiate between themselves and present it to a baffled but delighted Alec who looks like all his Christmases came at once.

(“So, you don’t want a boyfriend but do want to keep having sex with me, and you want to be in a relationship with me, but don’t want to have sex. And you’re both okay with other people kissing me, as long as it’s just each other?” He asks.

“Yeah, we figure that between the three of us, everybody gets what they need and nobody’s feels they got to do stuff they’re not into.” Eliot confirms.

“Pretty much,” Parker agrees, “I don’t get jealous when you kiss Eliot and Eliot’s already invested in our relationship working out. I think it’ll work.”

“Yeah, but I always figured that you don’t get jealous of me kissing Eliot because it generally involves you kissing both of us? I’m presuming that you guys not kissing ‘other people’ doesn’t include each other?” Alec queries.

Eliot and Parker look at each other speculatively, “well, it’s always fun…” “And Alec’s always been super into it…” “Oh, like you aren’t…” 

“Oh this is going to be so much fun,” Alec observes.)

The difficult bit is the feelings. Her lack of sexual desire isn’t a problem, that’s just how she’s wired. But when it comes to dealing with her feelings, she knows that she has real damage and problems with processing them. She keeps tripping over landmines in her own brain – and occasionally in Alec’s brain, because however well adjusted he is, he does have his own insecurities – and it’s so hard. She gets overwhelmed and crossed wires, and sometimes she just doesn’t have the same reference points that it seems that everyone else has. However much the rest of the team – especially Sophie and Eliot – have explained stuff to her over the years, sometimes she still comes up blank. 

She thought that she’d made her peace with who she is and all the ways in which she was broken. For years she took pride and pleasure in the looks and comments from others, learned to distrust and avoid those who wanted to ‘fix’ her. The thing about her boys – about the wider team in general but about them in particular - is that they don’t want to fix her. Mostly they want her to explain, and to explain to her in turn, so that they can all understand each other. Over time and experience she comes to understand that its much more about avoiding hurting each other than it is about faking normal for the job. 

Time, it appears, is the great healer. That and patience, and actually listening to each other, both what they say and what they don’t say. Eliot, for example, can say as much with a plate of food, as Alec can with a soliloquy. It takes her years to figure it out, to really understand – whether standing in a mountain crevasse or beside an open shallow grave, or in the hugs he gives Alec when she just can’t – that when Eliot tells her ‘there’s something wrong with you’ he means, ‘there’s something wrong with us’, he just fakes it better than her. And just because he’s further along the road to recovery than she is, doesn’t mean he doesn’t need to hear Alec’s reassurances that he likes the way they both turned out. That they are exactly the people they needed to be to survive the lives they lived before, and that they are safe take the time and the space to figure out which bits of them are things that need worked on and what bits are integral to who they are now that circumstances are different. A tacit promise between the three of them; that they will change together and continue to make space for whoever they each become. 

As far as Parker is concerned, there are as many different kinds of love, as there are people on the planet and as many different ways to tell someone they’re loved as there are combinations of people who care about each other. It’s just a matter of learning how to say it, or show it; in a way both you and they understand and agree on.

~

Alec isn’t sure exactly where it starts. Arguably it starts when Nate’s in prison, with a casual tipsy proposal for a friends with bennies arrangement. With the lazy roll of Parker’s shoulders as she tells them she has no interest in being an active participant but she’s quite happy to watch. In that moment hanging at the tipping point, seeing in Eliot’s smile that that was a compromise they were both happy to make. Or perhaps on the evening when she stopped asking them curious and awkward questions during the proceedings and started giving – surprisingly effective – instructions.

But if he’s honest he doesn’t really count it from there. Nor from the first time Parker pretend kissed him on a job or when she first admitted there might be feelings going on there. Instead he counts it from the aftermath of the job with the fake psychic. As much as revenge and stealing stuff help Parker re-establish her equilibrium, she is still reeling in the wake of having her oldest, rawest wound torn open. After Tara has gone home and while Nate is having a staring match with the whiskey that he hasn’t yet succumbed to, Alec finds her lying on the floor of Nate’s apartment with Eliot. The two of them lying at a 45-degree angle to each other, Parker’s head on Eliot’s shoulder, Eliot’s arm lying at an odd angle that suggests to Alec that he was probably petting Parker’s hair until he heard Alec’s footsteps approaching. Neither of them look like they’ve actually been crying, but they’re both a bit hollow eyed in way that suggests that whatever they were bonding over wasn’t remotely sunshine and puppies. Their smiles when they do see him, are as welcoming as they are wobbly, so Alec has no qualms about stealing a cushion from the sofa and dropping down to sit on the floor beside their heads. He fills them in on the ends he’s been tying up on the job and, as he suspected, Eliot starts absently stroking Parker’s hair again. Given his own slightly awkward crush on Parker, Alec is a little surprised at how un-jealous he feels about the whole situation. Parker and Eliot’s friendship is very different from his own with either of them – or for that matter the one they share as a trio – and however intimate this moment was, he feels privileged to be allowed to see it more than anything else. Nonetheless, once he’s run out of update to give them, he can’t resist teasing them just a little. 

“So is this a private cuddlepile or can, like, anyone join,” he asks, keeping his tone light to make sure they know he’s teasing. 

The smile that drifts across both their faces is terrifyingly alike, equal parts mischief and conspiratorial. Before Alec realises what’s happening they’re both up and moving, tackling him flat onto his back. He’s very glad he detoured for the cushion, because he finds himself completely pinned down, by two unreasonably strong teammates, apparently determined to cuddle him into submission. Or at least to use his shoulders as pillows. Handily, they’ve left his arms mostly free, so with only a little awkward wriggling he’s able to get the cushion under his head. After that he tentatively rests his hands on each of their shoulders and is rewarded with a swift poke in the ribs from each side in turn, as Parker and Eliot snitch on each other’s fondness for having their hair played with. The angle is far from ideal and the floor is hard, but Alec wouldn’t suggest moving for all the games on Steam.

(The morning after, Alec will overhear Tara teasing a slightly off-kilter Nate. 

“What? Did you catch them using your apartment to have a threesome or something?”

“Worse,” Nate will deadpan in return, “fully-clothed, puppy-pile on the floor with all my sofa cushions.”

“Urgh,” she’ll respond in mostly mock-disgust, “actual intimacy!”

“Horrifying, I know,” Nate will agree.)

Nothing that happens later would be possible without that first shared nap curled up together on the floor. Not having sex with Eliot or dating Parker per se, but the intimacy and acceptance of those couple of hours is what they build the three of them on later. The trust that allows them to negotiate around their very different sexual proclivities and emotional needs has its foundation here as much as in the work they do together. 

~

The core of Eliot’s friendship with Sophie has always been that they are alike in one very specific and very important way. They are very good at pretending to be whatever other people want to see. 

Eliot’s favourite thing about spending time with Parker and Hardison is that he doesn’t have to pretend with them. They respect the masks he wears and indulge his defence mechanisms, but they never let him forget for any real length of time, that they can see right through them. It’s both terrifying and freeing at the same time. 

After Aimee, Eliot has preferred to keep his dating casual, lets both his dates and his colleagues think that it’s about the work. That he’s married to his job. It’s easier all round that way, no one gets expectations that can’t be fulfilled, and no one gets their heart broken. He knows all the moves, all the right things to say and do, he can play the devoted and considerate lover, it’s just that he can only fake it so far, and after that someone always ends up getting hurt. (All too often that person is him, just because he doesn’t feel the way other people need him to, doesn’t mean he doesn’t care.) Distance is probably what kept Aimee and him going for so long, what allowed him to fool her, when years later she still sees through him so easily. (He'll never ask her though. He doesn't need to hear the truth that he knows himself: that this is who he always was. Eliot has left a lot of things behind on dusty battlefields and in grotty cells, but this wasn't one of them.) He’s pushing forty these days and he’s just _tired_ of pretending.

It’s Hardison who gives him a word for it. Aromantic. Eliot’s never been much of one for labels, he is what he is, mostly attracted to women and occasionally to men – and even more rarely moved to act upon that attraction – but there’s something in the casual way that Hardison uses the word, like it’s a valid explanation that makes Eliot grudgingly accept that sometimes labels are helpful. It takes some getting used to, but gradually he comes to accept that what he can give is enough, that in counterpoint with Parker they make an unusual but no less stable triangle. To accept that the loyalty and devotion he feels for Parker and Hardison, while different from what they feel for him, or for each other for that matter, is no less valued or appreciated. And for that, it is no sacrifice at all to promise not to sleep with anyone else. 

The unexpected advantage of all this is that he doesn’t remotely worry that Hardison will be jealous of the arrangement that Eliot and Parker have evolved. Hardison is open minded and adventurous about sex and sexuality which is great in a lover and in a friend, but Eliot still struggles to explain that there are things that he’s into that are definitely kinky but very much not in a sex way. Parker just cocks her head at him and double checks that it’s definitely not a sex thing – ‘wouldn’t be asking you if it was, darling’ – and agrees to help if she can. Eliot knows if he just wanted to be tied up, or to ‘sub’ for someone in bed, he could find someone for that easily. The problem is that he wants someone he trusts to put him down into subspace and let him take care of them, just not sexually. Once she gets the hang of it, Parker is great at it. She evolves a great Dom voice, and once he’s down, she’ll let him brush her hair or hand feed her, or do a dozen other little devotions, up to and including just sitting at her feet while she cards her fingers through his hair. It’s just…nice. For an hour or so, he can just switch off and feel safe, trusting to Hardison’s security systems, and not having to think about anything but Parker’s comfort. It’s reassuring too, knowing that Parker isn’t getting anything sexual out of it either. That it’s just something she finds comforting and empowering. Something precious and theirs. 

~

Parker loves both her boys, there’s not much she won’t do to keep them safe and happy, but sex isn’t one of those things. Alec is bisexual, and accidentally polyamorous, having somehow ended up with an asexual girlfriend and an aromantic boyfriend. Eliot is tired of pretending, but he’s got a Dom and a lover and neither of them asks him for anything he can’t give. 

It may not be what most people call normal, but as Hardison’s Nana likes to say, normal’s what works for you, and this most definitely works for them.

**Author's Note:**

> A couple of months ago I had a really stressful job application process to go through. Everything else in life went on hold for the duration, but as stress relief I had another word document open throughout in which I was writing an indulgent Id-fic that could be as tropey and indulgent as it wanted because it would likely never see the light of day. I expected to abandon it to my unfinished stories pile but I came across it the other day and I still like it, so I finished it off and I offer it up to anyone else having a bad day. It stems from the idea that Hardison is bisexual but not polyamorous, yet has a girlfriend who doesn't do sex and a boyfriend who doesn't do feelings and somehow that works for all three of them. I also wanted to write something that acknowledged the whole boatloads of damage that Parker & Eliot have without making that synomynous with their sexuality, I don't know how well I succeeded there.


End file.
